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Understand Your Financial Needs After Injury

Even if you're being offered a settlement for a personal injury incident, there may be some unseen costs that could severely undermine your spending freedom. If you don't plan carefully, you may be stuck with continuing bills and costs from medical complications long after the settlement funds have been exhausted. Consider a few negotiation areas that can help you demand a more flexible, fair compensation plan that protects you best interests.

Damages To Earning Income

Whether your injury was work-related or not, there may be real effects that can ruin productivity and weaken your ability to maintain a steady income.

Your job performance may be lower because of injury, either due to physical or mental suffering or the physical inability to perform all or parts of the job. Even if your performance is only slightly slowed, a weaker performance may make you less attractive for promotion considerations.

Even if the injury isn't your fault, employers and prospective clients have a reasonable concern when looking to you for work. To make your compensation case stronger, get full statements from your co-workers, employers, clients and others who rely on your skills in order to draw a map of costs and lost reliability.

You may not be able to pinpoint a specific number for compensation, but putting actual facts behind negotiation plans can help you make a compensation claim stronger. There is always the chance that your legal opponent could accuse your employers of fraud, so make sure to have a neutral medical professional team assessing your physical and mental condition to go along with the claim.

Costs At The Pharmacy

There are small costs that can eat away at your settlement over time that you may not consider. Pain pills, heating pads, emergency trips to the pharmacy after a doctor's visit and many other issues could become lifetime costs that a finite settlement amount simply can't cover unless its far beyond what you're likely to spend in your lifetime.

Think about a bottle of pain medication. Purchasing over-the-counter or prescription pain killers and medication can add up each month, and the pain may not even go away after a single year. Add to that the other costs associated with getting medication, such as gas mileage, testing other more expensive types of medication or even having the prescription written. 

Make sure that your settlement includes language for yearly evaluation and medication assistance. If your injuries reach outside of the standard health insurance system, such as with vision or dental problems, push for a supplemental insurance plan to cover the difference. Contact a personal injury lawyer, such as Kirkpatrick & Zeitz, to find out what can be done for your injury settlement negotiations


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